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Tag Archives: Weird

Body Politic

Something happened in the night and where, before The Event, your body was a whole, obeying your brain, now it is a cacophony of competing voices, a comity of equal limbs and organs. Somehow you have to all work together and find a new way to live.

The game works best with four players (one for each limb) and one referee, though an additional player can act out the actions as directed through the referee.

All you have to do is try to get through your everyday life, doing perfectly normal things.

Players may not speak with each other.

Players may nominate a player from amongst them to speak and perform other miscellaneous actions when the game calls for it.

Players only communicate with the GM in ’rounds’.

‘Rounds’ are conducted by writing down what your limb does and passing the note to the GM.

The GM then interprets the actions and tells you the result – often with hilarious results.

Example Sessions: Get up, shower, get dressed, clean your teeth, have breakfast and leave the house.Get into your car, start it, drive to work, park and enter the office.
Complete a day’s work at the office.

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I can’t really enter, because I provided prizes, but you can check out the competition and enter yourself HERE.

From Invisible Etchings to the Atom Heart of Siva Goth, The Cabinet of Curiosity holds a plenitude of strange, ghastly and unnatural objects. The cabinet itself warps time and space and upon touching an item it holds you are whisked away to live out the story of how it was found.

Darkzel (Zachary) was an artist who worked for me over a number of years, providing art for Hentacle, Cthentacle, Blood! and a number of other projects as well as working with me on a comic project and discussing work on other, potential multimedia projects in the future.

Zel provided me with art and in return I got to see a young, talented and very promising artist grow in confidence, flexibility and skill. I got to help pay his way through his education and I got to become his friend in the process, as well as paying for some wonderful art along the way.

Zel was tragically killed while working as an English teacher in Korea, cutting short a life and a very promising career.

I’ve always enjoyed being able to help young artists by offering them work, and after what happened with Zel I decided that the best thing to do in order to honour his memory and our friendship was to set up a scholarship fund for other promising young artists.

Young fantasy, comic, anime and science fiction artists face an uphill struggle. The artistic establishment is often not equipped to understand and encourage them and art is often seen as a wasted education by parents and others. Art supplies are expensive and support can also be hard to find.

My intention is to help provide for these students, or other artists in need of help, and to create a self-perpetuating scholarship fund that builds over time.

Each year I invite donations to the fund. These donations go on top of the existing money raised over the past year from ongoing sales of Zel’s art, and of sales of donated art to support the fundraising effort as well as art from those who win the scholarship each year. Over time this will create a collection of art by talented young artists and kind donors, providing them with exposure and money, and contributing to the fund for artists in the following years.

You can help by donating money here, donating art, and by spreading the word to budding young artists in school, college or university, or artists who are in need for other reasons – unemployment, disability, mental health etc.

The ancient Magus Wars – though they go by many other names – have left many scars on the landscape. From enchanted ruins to luminous swamps, from gibbering aberrations to floating islands. During the wars the squabbling wizards created many servants, from the Brass Soldiers of Ludum Quat to the Invisible Hornets of Chung the Impeccable. Not every servant was built for war though and servants were made as cooks, handymen, workers, even curators.

The Encyclopedes were born in the laboratories of Dakram Findspell, more librarian and alchemist than true wizard. Obsessed by the gathering and collation – rather than the use – of knowledge he created the Encyclopedes to maintain and order his vast library.

After his death the Encyclopedes took on a life of their own and continue to gather information – especially spells – wherever they can. They create caches of knowledge and magic and devote their entire existence to it, to the point where they will happily suck the knowledge from a man’s skull to add to their own.

Encyclopedes knows almost everything and deep in their holdings they maintain a magical book of stupendous size. Each colony has one and – magically – it shares knowledge with all the other books and Encylcopedes throughout the world and the other planes of existence.

Encyclopedes gain an almost sexual degree of pleasure from correcting someone of their false information. They are insufferably smug, gigantic – the size of three people – and painfully arrogant.

It is said you can read their tome, after a fashion, their language is not discernible to any other being, but in the act of trying to read it you can gain the truthful answer to any single, answerable question. Reason enough for people to seek to Encyclopede’s out for trade – or theft.